Just after 5 p.m. on July 8, 2015 the sky over Mira, Italy, turned charcoal-grey and thunder rumbled in the distance. The storm we had been told would break the insufferable humidity and high temperatures that had suffocated the Veneto Region and most of Italy for days was on its way.

Can state officials or the media really be surprised that promises of an internal investigation don't appease? The true state of emergency now, like back in 1968, isn't rage or even rock throwing. It is the racial profiling and racial brutality of the police. America's real state of emergency remains that black lives still don't matter enough.

In declaring a state of emergency in Missouri before any actual announcement by the Ferguson grand jury, Gov. Jay Nixon is shedding a valuable light on what happens when a culture of fearful white supremacy can't tolerate dissent, disorder, or difference.

Although another round of violence in Ferguson may well be inevitable, how we understand what happens there is not. It is our responsibility to ask, particularly when things get violent, who it is that has the guns, the tanks, the tear gas, and the batons. Let us not get our history of protest in America wrong one more time.